In contrast to the shared grief and affection of Elizabeth and Justine, Victor has
immured himself in a barricaded isolation, unable to attract sympathy and, through
his lack of candor, unable also truly to offer it.

Mary Shelley here suggestively reveals that Victor's self-education involves no sense
of social responsibility for the knowledge he might attain. Victor's withdrawal from
Elizabeth and barring of Clerval from his confidence also initiates a pattern of being
secretive about that knowledge, whether it is in the construction of the Creature
(I:3:10) or the withholding of evidence from a court examining a murder (I:7:1). That
he has conducted his entire life without candor will increasingly be seen to have
implications for the veracity of the narrative, since, after such a pattern of evasion
becomes clear, the reader might well begin to wonder why we should credit what he
says in the present instance as the unvarnished truth.

Justine in her honesty unwittingly testifies against herself. Yet such a detail, so
indicative of her candor, could have easily weighed in her favor in a less hostile
courtroom environment.

Although it dates from June 1818, and thus postdates the publication of the first
edition of Frankenstein by several months, Percy Bysshe Shelley's fragment of an essay
"On Life" has a passage that may shed light on Mary Shelley's own attitude to her
adolescent student's disenchantment with a philosophical discipline that deconstructs
rather than creates:

Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining as pioneer*
for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error,
and the roots of error. It leaves, what is too often the duty of the reformer in political
and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.# It reduces the mind to that freedom in
which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments
of its own creation. —By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including what
is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense almost
all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their
capacity of suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts. —Our
whole life is thus an education of error. (Reiman-Powers, eds., Shelley's Poetry and
Prose, p. 477)

*advance guard.

#see I:1:10, and note.

This additional blindness removes all doubt that Victor himself, at the very least,
sees a moral flaw in his having spurned his family. In essence, to ignore one's loved
ones is to break one's basic ties with the natural.

Victor does not realize the irony implicit in his words, as he describes this initial
abrogation of his responsibility and his transfer of obligation onto his newly made
Creature. It is the Creature who thus innocently asserts his shared bond, only to
find himself spurned by his Creator. Yet there is also a secondary irony behind the
first, for this account is narrated by a man who has been spending his recent months
singleheartedly pursuing the being from whom he originally ran away.

This is in English an obsolete usage, though it is still current in French and Italian,
meaning "to await."

This is one of the two clearly identifiable but irreconcilable dates in the novel:
the other (Monday, 31 July) is contained in Walton's fourth letter to his sister (I:L4:1).
It has been noted, however, that the shift of one day here (to Thursday, May 8) would
reconcile the timeframe, allowing us to date the year of William's death as 1794 and
of Walton's letter as 1797.

The sense here of the son's challenge to the father's authority surfaces generally
throughout Victor's narrative. The question of justice that is here quietly insinuated
will become central to the conclusion of Volume 1 of the novel.

Thonon, or Thonon-les-Bains, the capital of the Cablais district in Savoy, located
on the southern edge of Lake Geneva, in the Rhône-Alpes region of southeastern France.
Its mineral springs have long made it a popular summer resort.

Thonon was at the center of a number of battles between the Duke of Savoy and the
Bernese during the Reformation. St. Francis of Sales performed missionary work in
the region, and worked to keep Thonon Catholic in the sixteenth century. It was taken
by France in 1792, but restored to Piedmont and Sardinia in 1816 after the fall of
Napoleon.